Seventeen In '88 - Installment 15: Something Happens

Seventeen In ’88 – A story of teen angst, long walks, dirty jokes, haunted rooms, haunted psyches, records as refuge, roads like mazes, young love, bonding and unbonding, deep foreboding, senseless death, and innocence peeled away slowly, layer by layer.

Something Happens

Shortly after the State tournament Emily and I started dating. She is the school’s reigning queen of academia. I am the school’s reigning king of theater nerds. So it makes sense, kind of.

Emily is tall and thin with long straight hair. A brunette. And she is good at everything – talented, gorgeous, easily the most gifted, intellectually astute individual in our peer group. Yet on the surface she also has an odd veneer of awkwardness, insecurity. Which of course makes her charming.

For my part, I am not particularly good at anything except Speech & Drama and memorizing Rolling Stones liner notes. (Hey, did you know that Keith Richards doesn’t even play on two of the best songs on Sticky Fingers?) My grades seldom rise above the upper end of mediocre and my plans for the future usually don’t extend much further than the next couple of hours, during which time I hope to be listening to The Meat Puppets, eating a frozen pizza, and watching the Dodgers game.

But, for whatever reason (extreme lack of self-awareness? blind stupidity?), I am confident. And confidence, I have learned, can take you a long damn way.

It is a whirlwind romance. Her parents disapprove. After a long, furious argument during which her father curses me and declares that I shall never see his daughter again, Emily and I resolve to steal away during the night and elope. I steal a car and meet her in the dark behind her house. Rain is pouring, a baptism of our sacred union. We take off, tires screeching across the pavement, joyously singing along to the radio, waving goodbye to all the losers left behind. They’ll never know what true love is!

Sigh. Sorry, none of that is true. Her parents, while not altogether comfortable, and clearly suspicious of this smirky new figure in their daughter’s life, are about as accommodating as can be expected. More so, really, given that my friends and I, with all of our noise and weird humor, are a sudden constant presence in their house. And despite a few bits of weirdness - Emily and I had an alarming tendency to make out in full view of others, a habit that alienated (and grossed out) more than a couple of our friends, the early part of our relationship is mostly the stuff of typical teenage romance. It’s clumsy, hyper-emotional, exploratory, blissful. Covered in the strange gauze of exciting newness that characterizes the early part of most relationships, but is especially acute in the teenage years.

Oddly, there is no music in my memory of this time. If there was it would probably be something a bit fey, cloying. “Oh Very Young” by Cat Stevens maybe. Although I do remember sitting around in my room playing records with her. The Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan, Fairport, as always. No doubt feeling as though I was imparting great wisdom. I also composed for her a lengthy list of the “Greatest Rock Albums Ever Made”, cribbed primarily from The Rolling Stone Record Guide. Yeah, I must have thought, that’ll really make her heart skip a beat. What a Nerdy Teenage Boy thing to do.

For all my confidence, during this time I am not immune to insecurities of my own. At one point, in Emily’s room, I come across a list that she has made up of all the traits that her ideal mate should have. One of these is “He’s tall.” This makes me paranoid, because she is particularly tall for her age and I am an inch or two shorter than she is. I resolve to try to be taller.

Whatever our weaknesses, and whatever would become of us, we were good for each other. Another 1988 walking memory: the two of us are out walking at night and someone shouts her name from a moving car. She tells me it’s probably somebody making fun of her. As the brainy, gawky girl she gets that a lot. I am thrilled and relieved. Hey, she’s a misunderstood genius, too!

And, for good measure, one more walking memory (walking, walking, we were always walking):

Emily and I are walking around her neighborhood. It’s warm. There is green everywhere, bright green, almost fluorescent, and the air is clearer than it will ever be again. She’s wearing a checkered blue dress. Smiling, that wide stretch of perfect white teeth flashing some kind of other, better reality than the one I’d been living in before.

We’re walking, and I’m admiring the pattern of cracks in the sidewalk. We find an open space in some bushes, a cove where we are obscured from passersby.

This seems like a good place to stay for the foreseeable future.